29 women held in Iran for protesting against hijab

Bobbie Sutton |Sunday, February 04, 2018

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The Islamic dress code, established in the 1979 revolution, makes the Islamic veil or hijab, mandatory for any woman over the age of 13 in Iran and says that they must cover themselves from head to foot while they reject any dress that embraces the figure. The women of Iran have always been ignored.

"Authorities know that if they don't crack down, Iranian women will continue to test the boundaries of what they can and cannot wear".

The woman, 31-year-old Wida Mowahed, a mother of a 19-month-old daughter, stood in the middle of Tehran's "Inqlab" (revolution) street raising her scarf on a stick and waving it like a flag.

Tehran police suggested that their actions were incited by foreigners, saying those arrested were "deceived" into removing their hijabs, Iran's semiofficial Tasnim News Agency reported. "But now ... I think the government of Iran, they have the fear of these courageous women", founder Masih Alinejad CBC Radio on Wednesday.

A prominent human rights lawyer told AFP on Tuesday that one of the women detained had her bail set at more than $100,000.

"The Iranian police announced in 2014 that they've warned, arrested or sent to court almost 3.6 million women because of having bad hijab, so these arrests are not new, if people are protesting it's exactly because of such a crackdown", she told the Guardian.

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian activist behind the "White Wednesday" social media campaign against mandatory hijabs, who is now based in the United States, told CNN that the movement has not been influenced from overseas. The footage shows Mohaved waving her white hijab defiantly from the end of a pole, her black hair flowing uncovered.

Alinejad said she simply wants Iranian women to have a choice about whether they wear one or not. "40,000 vehicles have been confiscated because their drivers have violated the hijab rule", she said and added that her campaign has been a reaction to this situation.

Women protesting the hijab are sometimes referred to in Iran as "girls of Enghelab Street", which is a reference to the original heroine of the movement, Vida Movahed.

Omid Memarian, a US-based Iranian journalist who was once imprisoned in Iran, wrote on social media that the fight against forced hijab "is not about whether the hijab is good or bad".

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